Tokyo Day 3

The third day here was a mess. It wasn't quite a typhoon but 20mph+ winds and tons of rain fall hit us. It was a constant struggle to battle the wet, windy conditions and our feet, socks, shoes, clothes were all soaked. Kevin, who we had struggled to find earlier, lost his umbrella, getting it completely destroyed by the winds. He ended up buying a new one.

Anyway, the day started out with Scott and I making our rounds to the train station to meet up with Kevin, one of my co-workers at Boeing, in Shinjuku station. It actually wasn't too bad because Kevin wasn't new to Japan train stations, being in Nagoya for a while. He did first go to Tokyo Station first, but made his way to Shinjuku to find us.

On the other hand, Alex's friend Barney didn't... Alex and Ting are Scott's australian neighbors and they met us in Shinjuku and we were waiting for their friend Barney there. He was to meet us there during his short layover at Tokyo. Problem was, he went to the wrong train station, and we didn't have voice communication with him. They were stuck text messaging each other, but we didn't realize that they were probably at the wrong station for a while, after we had circled around the busiest train station in the city. Ha!

Anyway, the group of us spent much of the day trying to find dry weather and in the big department stores. When I say big, I mean HUGE. 14 stories of shoppingness. Also the train station is a maze to figure out...

Later on, we went to this mysterious bar called... well Mysterious. Actually the full title was Neo-Tokyo Fooding Bar: Mysterious. It's a pretty neat place. No shoes allowed, and you walk around in an asteroid-like atmosphere to simulate SPACE. Then you walk up into individual pods for your group and eat and drink in that confined cage. The female servers are dressed in interesting enticing space suits with moon boots and whatnot. It's a pretty cool experience.

The rest of the night was travel back to Tsukuba followed by taco fiesta and The Office marathon with 7 people at Scott's tiny pad.


And here's a couple photo's from yesterday:

A Temple in Akihabara

One of the gigantor buildings with built-in LCD
(its featured in Lost in Translation)
It also houses the most incredibly sized Starbucks ever.

A view from the street level of Shibuya District